Like Getting Bills in the Post but Paying for Them Online? There’s an App for That

LONDON — In an age when more people are opting to pay their bills online, technology enabling you to pay your bills by taking a smartphone photo of the piece of paper it comes on might seem, well, a bit backward.

But a Croatian start-up sees a potential market in people who are still getting, and paying, their bills in paper form but want to start dipping into the online payment world gently.

Set up in 2013, PhotoPay employs eight engineers recruited from the University of Zagreb, and works with banks such as Austria’s Erste Group Bank AG, which uses the company’s technology to allow its customers to pay their utility bills, delivered in the post, by taking a photo of them.

The Croatian company is now planning to set up a sales operation in London so it can persuade big international banks headquartered in the city to offer their retail customers services using Photopay technology.

PhotoPay’s founder Damir Sabol insists that paper bills will be around for a few years yet and remain very popular in countries like Poland, even if they are declining in markets such as the UK due to growing use of direct debits.

Photopay points to a Juniper Research report that predicted a four-fold increase in mobile payments in the five years to 2017.

And PhotoPay isn’t the only tech company that sees big opportunities in combining the latest mobile technology with old-fashioned paper billing.

Document recognition software group Mitek Systems Inc. launched technology to pay paper bills with a smartphone camera earlier this year. It is being used by another U.S. company, the online payments specialist Allied Payment Network to power Picture Pay, which is similar to PhotoPay’s product.

PhotoPay’s technology lets you take a photo of a utility bill with your phone then takes you to an online checkout where you can pay the bill with one click.

It either scans the data from a quick response, or QR, code on the bill or picks up the numbers directly from the bill.

Despite his plans to set up a PhotoPay base in London, Mr. Sabol sees exciting prospects for the Croatian tech sector, having helped to establish Zagrebački Inkubator Poduzetništva, or ZIP, the Zagreb Entrepreneur Incubator in English. Companies that have benefited from ZIP’s support include Sizem, which developed an app to help women calculate their correct bra size and agroNode, developer of a web-based system for managing crop irrigation.